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By Anne BarnardTHE NEW YORK TIMES • Monday January 28, 2013 6:55 AM

BEIRUT — Violence flared across Syria yesterday, as government warplanes and artillery
intensified attacks on rebels in the suburbs east and south of Damascus. Fighting closed the
highway to the southern city of Daraa, and clashes continued in the strategic central province of
Homs and the eastern city of Deir al-Zour, according to state media and anti-government
activists.

Fierce fighting and desperate living conditions have sent 30,000 Syrians fleeing into Jordan in
the past month, with thousands more entering Lebanon and massing on the border with Turkey, as the
United Nations seeks increased international aid for the relief effort.

The chaos worsened ahead of meetings on the crisis scheduled for today, when the main exile
opposition group and its international backers are to convene in Paris, and civilian opposition
leaders, including some who oppose the use of force, plan a conference in Geneva.

More than 60,000 people have died in the nearly 2-year-old conflict, but international efforts
to end the crisis appear stalled, with the opposition divided and Russia, the main backer of Syrian
President Bashar Assad at loggerheads with the Syrian opposition’s Western and Arab supporters.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev told CNN yesterday that Assad’s chances of remaining in
office “are getting smaller and smaller,” but reiterated Russia’s insistence that Assad’s ouster
could not be a precondition for talks, as the U.S.-backed Syrian opposition leaders demand.

Medvedev said that the United States, Europe and regional powers must “sit the parties down for
negotiations, and not just demand that Assad go and then be executed,” like Libya’s ousted leader,
Moammar Gadhafi, “or be carried to court sessions on a stretcher like Hosni Mubarak,” the deposed
Egyptian president.

“This must be decided by the Syrian people,” he said, “not Russia, not the United States, not
any other country.”